I've noticed that many of the voices in the republic who loudly demanded in the run up to the last referendum that Scotland vote to leave the Union they'd been part of for three centuries, for an unnatural land border to be created, and for the island of Britain to be partitioned; are the exact same voices that have about turned and are now just as loudly demanding the UK remain in the European Union they've been part of for only four decades.
In 2014 they were banging on about how Scotland was an independent country and very much looking back to a rosy cliche of Scotland as a one dimensional shortbread tin place, invoking Culloden and the past in a very positive and nationalistic way. Yet now we are told by the same people that anyone who supports leave is a racist little Englander looking back to a rosy place that can no longer exist in the 21C.
Many of them are using the refugee crisis to get cheap digs in against our neighbour, posting diatribes, memes, and pictures of right wing English loons, instead of doing summat more positive and productive like demanding the refugees come here to safety in the Republic of Ireland, where there's twelve times less people than in Britain, and lots more room for them.
The same pseudo-political luvvies who were banging on about how unfair the un-elected Commission, and what they were then calling a dictatorship of Europe, was to Ireland after the economic crash of 2008, are now suddenly big fans of the EU; getting their rocks off using the upcoming referendum to indulge in one of their favourite cultural sports. Brit bashing.
This inconsistency and reversal of position from advocating for breakaway independent nation states to European federalism, has led me to wonder: could it be that what is really driving these loud anti-English voices to get involved in the sovereign decisions of the neighbouring isle when posting all their scaremongering pictures and memes, is not a genuinely helpful desire and consistent political position, nor giving two hoots about what is best for the people of Europe, Britain or Scotland; but a lingering age old latent cultural enmity toward the English common in some of the over 40s here. Inculcated into society and culture over three generations by Eamon de Valera and his gang of religious nutbags.
Who, let's not forget, before the great hero murdered by his own people, Michael Collins, had even returned to Dublin with the best deal for independence he and the team that Dev handpicked to parlay with the most able of the British empire, could negotiate - decided, without even having met Collins off the boat and read the proposal, solely through his jealously of the younger man, to bring about the sin and stain of the Irish civil war. All over a form of words he swore he would 'wade through rivers of Irishmen's blood' rather than utter.
Then, ten years later, after his destructive antics had left him sidelined from public life, the great dictator Dev u-turned, went into parliamentary politics, swore an oath to the King that he previously instigated the civil war over; and proceeded to sell out every single ideal of the republic's founding Proclamation once in power.
With absolutely no input from the Brits, Dev set about reducing the status of Irish women to little more than the property of their husbands, using the bully pulpit of church and state to name, shame, surveil, brainwash, and control through fear the Irish people; imprisoned all his former comrades in arms who disagreed with him, banned from publication in Ireland all her greatest writers, created the state slave and sex abuse factories into which were tossed anyone transgressing the sickeningly hypocritical morals of the ultra-dysfunctional Church; making Ireland a laughing stock, and treating the country as his own private fiefdom.
Spending the rest of his life making sure there was total silence about the crimes of the civil war, state and church, and deflecting all the silent unexpressed hatred for the contemporary crimes of church and state he was responsible for creating, onto the English, by playing the role of whinging victim and concentrating the focus of the national mind onto the historical injustices the English had visited upon Ireland, with the mantra of eight hundred years, eight hundred years.
I have not seen one post from the 'eight hundred years' crowd using the refugee crisis to bash the Brits, calling for the Republic of Ireland to take in refugees. Plenty of posts demonsing the English and using refugees as the excuse to do so, but nothing by way of concrete proposals, or even calls, to welcome refugees over here. Not one.
Why?
Don't they want refugees here?
The numbers of asylum seekers and conditions these poor frightened people escaping terror in their homelands are more or less jailed in when they arrive in the republic, certainly suggest that we the citizens of the republic should look at our own cultural faults and flaws first, before finding easy and cheap ways to creatively engage in playing the victim of the British empire at every opportunity and slagging off the auld (English) enemy.
OK, we all get the eight hundred years bit, but none of us alive now in the republic younger than ninety-five ever lived under British rule. And this aside, what did they ever do for us anyway? Apart from give us our infrastructure, law, English language and Anglophile culture?
'Eight hundred years, eight hundred years.' You don't hear the French and Germans dwelling on and moaning about far worse, and far more recent historical injustices. So, do us a favour, moaning Brit bashers; get over yourselves, and start practicing what you claim to preach in your whinging anti-English diatribes. Please. Thanks very much.
Post a Comment